Everything put on hold. Had a blowout on my rear tire yesterday. Waiting on the guy to come change it. Hopefully this week. Got some mowing and fall fertilizer to put out.

Don’t feel bad. I had one blow out last week and they shipped the wrong tire twice before I got the right one. It was a front tire.

Thanks, yeah that will come in handy.   Hard to reach some of those spots in the middle.

Attached File


got the conex up and on blocks.  doable between the forks and a high lift jack.

The floor is kinda toast.   When I pull the bad pieces, I might make up a little form under the perimeter and just pour a concrete "skirt" underneath it.  Give it more stability while keeping critters out better (maybe)

I just changed all 4 tires on my CAT backhoe...that's almost like real work. I was beat the next day.

@AMERIKINSHIP

Sounds like a lot of work .... even if somebody knew what they were doing [I don't].

Wonder how much you saved by doing it yourself?  

Did you mount the tires on the rims or just pulled the old tires off and put new ones on what were mounted?  

I think I'm going to have to change my 12 year old tractor tires soon.  

Thanks

I did not save a ton necessarily. Here's how it started. Last year I had one front tire that leaked down a couple times. Came completely off the bead once. This year both front tires were leaking down and I had to air them up pretty much every day. My machine came to me from the Northeast so it had some rusty spots, the wheels were pretty well crudded up. I called a local tire shop to see what they wanted to mount and dismount a set of 4 tires. It was supposed to cost me $200 total. I took them my fronts to dismount first so that I could get them bead blasted and powder coated. Went in the next day to pick them up and they charged me $75 to dismount 2 tires. Mounting them was going to be an additional $75. You see where this is going.

So I paid them, said I'd never be back, and went and bought a bunch of tire mounting stuff.

2 of these Ken-tool KEN34649 Super Duty Tubeless Truck Tire Iron (T45AS)

A bucket of this stuff Murphy's Tire and Tube Mounting Compound 25 lbs.

1 of these (should have ordered 2) Ken-Tool 31710 Bead Hldg Dvc

And I went nuts on this guy ESCO Hurricane Bead Seating Tank, 13-Gallon

There were much cheaper bead seating tank options, but I splurged. Rear tires are about 52" tall by 20" wide. Figured I could upgrade from using ratchet straps over the tire.

So I definitely spent some money. Could have bought cheaper stuff and probably got away with less of it, but I'll now never have to pay anyone to do this sort of thing again. Besides my sons will be big strapping lads one day, I can't very well tell them to go throw those tires on if I don't know how to do it myself


The fronts were about as much of a PITA to mount as a dirt bike tire. The rears were easier than the fronts if you can believe that. I did not have to contend with breaking the beads, but I would have just used the bucket to crunch down on them and pop them free. Overall it was definitely a job. I'm 45 and it wore me out a little, but it's big heavy stuff. If a guy had some help it would be no trouble at all and probably go 3 times faster.

ETA: Not sure how relevant, but I forgot to mention that I ordered new rear wheels. They were dinged up quite a bit and showed even more rust than the fronts so I just bit the bullet and got new ones. Figure I'll clean up the better of the 2 old ones and keep it around as a spare. I had 4 mismatched tires on the backhoe and while the fronts and rears were both listed as being the same sizes 12.5/80-18 and 19.5L-24, they all measured out differently. I'm not going to say what my new set of Michelins cost...

Attached File

A little minor lifting and transporting:

Nice!  Getting set up for deer season?

Both tire shops I use don’t charge me when I buy new tires. Now learn to change them without taking the rims off of the backhoe and you will be surprised how easy it is. Let the machine break the bead lift it up and spoon the old tire off lube the new one and start the top first and let gravity help you. In fact my shop prefers I leave them on the tractor if I can.

Is that a new one?

Yep.  I'm hosting a "Find a Cure" Youth Hunter Day late Oct.  It's a program where land owners let youth hunters (with a parent) hunt the property for TN Youth Deer Day.

Yep.  This one goes in the Back 20 woods end of my property.

Attached File


Picked up a new bush hog for the BX.

Cool. I hope the kids score a deer from it.

Put the new bush hog to work on one of my pastures. Hoping to get my 72in Jacobsen fixed this month and back to cutting. Bush hog made quick work of pushing the wood line back though which I needed. Attached File

A pto tree saw to rent/borrow would make short work of however much of the treeline you wanted to nuke.

Back up to whatever brush/trees you want to cut down, turn around and lift them out with the forks and pile them up to burn.

Used my tractor's FEL and a special tool I made about 25 years ago to pull up 9 t-post fence posts so I could reuse them elsewhere.  Took about 15 minutes or so, including driving around to each fence post.

General operation; you can just barely see the extraction tool at the top of the fence post:



Post out:




Once you've pulled the fence post, just toss it into the bucket:




Closeup of the tool.  I cut a railroad tie plate in half (or third or a quarter); then plasma- or torch-cut a hole resembling the profile of a t-post cross section.  Added a bolt and chain for something to grab onto.



You can see the tie plates origins in this pic:



The extraction tool tilts on operation, grabbing one of the fence posts studs; the FEL does the rest of the work.



Thanks for looking!

For those that don't have access to a torch, Tractor Supply sells something similar as well.  They work great.

Going to use goats and Kunes to thin out the understory and then hire a forestry mulcher to come in and take down what we don’t want. There’s so much scrub that I don’t even go in there.

That's definitely easy mode.  Nothing to stack and burn.  Its just a tree eraser.

There's a place in town here that will rent a skidsteer with one of those mounted on the front for 750 a day.

Relocated Pepe

Attached File

That's how I disposed of one almost a decade a go.  

I had two benefits:

- It was in the 20's and I had left it over night
- I can't smell

LoL, yea the cold does help. This one got stuck in the fence and my wife got it out. Dogs were in their pen all day long because the skunk was out. It hurt one of its back legs so wasn’t getting around well. We put it in the tractor bucket and relocated to an old building. Pepe pissed himself on the ride, but when I got him out of the bucket he crawled off into the building fine so maybe he’ll do ok.

Worked on one.

My dad and I had to get a hot coal fire going to heat up the front axle extension on one side of the 648. With a little time and pressure… success! This tractor coasted over a hill and hit a tree in 2008 when my grandfather forgot to set the parking brake. A new loader and some work, she should be on the path to recovery.

Attached File

Hauling some logs out of the woods

What is that contraption on your 3 point?

Looks like a PTO winch.

Yep, Norse 490 PTO winch.      
https://www.farmzilla.com/detail/1154851/used-2022-norse-490-winch
Totally kicks ass.   After winching them in with blade down, hook each log to winch frame hookups, then lift blade to haul up to half a dozen big logs.   Winch bottom has rear-facing blade to dig in when winching.    The main cable has various choker hooks on it, so I can hook chokers to up to half a dozen logs scattered around and haul them all in at once.

And goddamn fucking shit government - the last time I used this, I got the regen light, so the tractor had to sit there with engine racing at full throttle for 20-30 minutes; longer than my actual usage of the tractor.   That regen shit had to have used up far more fuel and polluted far more air than an engine without that stupid shit on it would have done.



Here's someone else's video showing a smaller one in use:

Huh, I've never seen such a thing.  Looks like it would work slick.  

Yea, I love regen about as much as you do.

You’re absolutely right! It’s not about the environment it’s about costing people money!!!

I attempted to use the TC29 I picked up over the summer. Figured I'd work the driveway a little bit and maybe get a few buckets of snow to pile up for my daughter to play in... Note to self, roll the bucket and raise the belly mower before parking in the winter. Both are frozen to the ground

Attached File

Don’t feel bad. The bottom rollers on the skidsteer froze solid last week even with it parked in the barn.

Had one day last week after a rainy couple of days and the current Icecopolis we're current experiencing to get some firewood work done.  One of my Poplars fell over during a storm.  I knew this one was dead or dying and planned to take it out; the storm did the work for me; plus it got rid of the stump as well.

Missed both my Chiken Shak and my shop:



I used my Echo CS501P to cut it up to grapple-sized pieces and moved it to my firewood processing area near my pole barn:



The -501P having its way one of the trunks:



The easy and fast way to buck up trees!



Getting rid of the trunk in the woods.  Barely visible off to the right is my Pole Barn Shooting House:




Thanks for looking!

I just resurrected this 1950s Oliver OC-3 crawler that hasn't run since the mid-90s.   AKA Cletrac HG-31 - track centers are 31" apart.   I used this super-handy little crawler quite a bit in the 1990s for hauling logs out of the woods.   Then I removed the magneto to get it rebuilt, and never got around to putting it back in again and timing it.   So it has sat in our barn since then.  

Since the 90s, I have used first a 35HP I-H B414 2WD tractor with a Norse 490 PTO winch and now a 60HP Kubota M5660 4WD with the same winch for logging.

I recently got motivated to get the old OC-3 running again in order to sell it, so here it is in action.  I don't know how much it weighs, but it's much lighter than my current tractor.   But it's small and fits nicely into tight spaces.  It also has a lot of ground clearance, so it will go pretty much anywhere.   Wife is saying "Don't sell it", so maybe I'll just hang on to it.

I just used it to drag out a couple trees I'd cut down so our solar panels weren't shaded during December sunrise.  It was hard to get to the area where the trees were down, so this was perfect for squeezing into a tight area.

I found someones wire cable
Attached File

I did some driveway clearing with my Everything Attachments 8 rear grader blade.  I also did a couple hills on our one mile gravel road, but not pics of that.  

Our driveway outside our home; you can see the grader blade did not get all the ice off the road.  Hopefully, that will melt off tonight with our current 44 degree weather.  The concrete driveway ends about the same distance as the (apparently) white power pole above and to the left of the fire pit center; about 1/8 mile total.



The valley down below.



Another viewpoint pic:



Thanks for looking!

Someone has been watching some Diesel Creek videos!!!  

Good luck with the tractor!

Always like looking at pics of the area there. Nice views.

This tree was much too big for the OC-3 crawler to haul up the hill without cutting it, plus it was well frozen in place, so I had to squeeze the Kubota in there and use the winch.   It was quite a tight fit, but I was able to get in and then back out again with the whole tree in one pull.

I've got to get this fallen White Oak cut and moved.  If you look closely, there are two major tree trunks.  The tree itself - the damaged 20' high tree trunk on the left - is on my absent neighbor's property, as-is the 2nd tree trunk on the far side.  The closest trunk fell on my property.  I'll call the neighbor to see if he'll let me process his tree parts.

You'll also note the bright orange thing in the right center of the pic.  That's the remains of my orange Husky hard hat.  It fell off my tractor without me noticing it and I ran over it, destroying it.  

I hate when I have to cut and move trees on steep hills.    I've already cut and moved the upper part of the trunk, plus the Cedar that got smashed when it fell (shattered tree stump in the middle of the pic.

IFYKYK....

Attached File

Pine Beatle kill. We’ve lost several yellow pines this last few years.

Or dung beetle

Attached File

Moving snow today:

Firewood roundup:
Attached File

Turns out a FEL makes for an excellent helper when reinstalling a decorative windmill's fan after a bearing replacement

Attached File


Attached File

Love the M! Brings back good memories.